


let life be like music (and death a note unsaid)

by imposterhuman



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abuse, Canon Divergence, December 16, Gen, Grieving, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Hurt Tony, Hurt/Comfort, Italian Tony, Maria Stark feels, Maria Stark's A+ Parenting, Musical Instruments, Not CACW Compliant, Post Avengers, Pre-Stony, Sad Tony, Steve Is a Good Bro, Tony Angst, Tony Stark Feels, genius Tony, italian maria, maria plays piano, or just friendship - Freeform, prodigy maria, tony plays piano
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-02 03:07:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17879933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imposterhuman/pseuds/imposterhuman
Summary: tony might've been a stark, but he was maria's son, first and foremost





	let life be like music (and death a note unsaid)

**Author's Note:**

> title from a langston hughes quote
> 
> i love the idea of musical!tony and ive been wanting to write maria&tony for awhile now so here it is!
> 
> i hope i did okay, i dont play piano at all (im a violinist oops but those are more awkward for Family Fun Time Duets so no violins here)
> 
> tw: child and domestic abuse mentions, nothing graphic though but be safe!

It was no secret that Tony and Howard had a horrible relationship. Everyone knew it, backing it up with tabloid speculation, sealed hospital records, and photos of bruises that makeup couldn’t quite cover. Yet Howard was the only parent ever mentioned; Tony’s achievements were compared to his, Tony’s exploits and friendships and grades were always lined up against Howard's in the eyes of the public.

 

Howard, when he deigned to be around his son, was cruel and vicious. He _hated_ Tony, hated what he represented; a future, not so long off, in which Howard would be obsolete. Tony was smarter in every way, making a circuit board at four and an engine at seven before Howard had him shipped off to boarding school. He forced Tony to be hard as iron in the face of his whiskeyed words and brutal fists.

 

Tony’s _mamma_ taught him to be soft.

 

Maria Stark (née Carbonell, but no one ever remembered that, not when confronted with the Stark glamour and charm) preferred to live her life out of the public eye. She could flit and flirt at galas like any true Stark, easily winning donations with her demure smiles, but she hated doing it. She would much rather stay at home with her bottles, her piano, and her _bambino_.

 

She was no genius, not like Howard or Tony, but she _was_ a musician. Where Howard saw numbers and Tony saw _everything_ , she saw delicate notes of music. She thought in terms of scales and melodies. Maria was excellent at every instrument she tried, but her first love was for the piano. In the early days of her marriage, Howard had bought her one. He would sit with her for hours as she played love songs.

 

He left, eventually. The piano stayed. So did Maria.

 

Tony spent the little bits of time that he wasn’t studying or building for Howard with his _mamma._ He would sit at her side as she played piano, tapping out the melodies as best he could beside her.

 

“This is a C scale,” she would say, putting her delicate hands on his own to show him the patterns. “That’s it, _mio bambino._ You’re so smart.”

 

And Tony, with his slender fingers, already calloused and scarred ( _engineer’s hands,_ Howard had called them, barely a hint of approval as he handed his son another sharp tool), would copy her, giggling happily as he got it right.

  


As Tony grew older, they moved on from scales to haunting duets played at opposite ends of the bench. There was always a space between Tony and his _mamma_ , be it an octave or a bottle. Their music was sad, filled with loss and lies and a cold kind of beauty. More often than not, Maria was too drunk for the complicated fingerings she had once preferred, the wine slowing her hands to where Tony had to pick up her part. She would clap dutifully, though, after every piece, kissing her _tesoro_ lightly on the forehead before disappearing into her bedroom.

 

Every day, though, Maria would sit with her son for at least one piece. She played the higher harmonies, musician’s fingers hitting each note with a gentle kind of care. The wine never blurred her vision enough to make her miss a key. Tony would inch closer to her, hoping that maybe that day, she’d hug him, touch him, be something other than the ghost that haunted the Mansion. He’d play the melody, dark and slow with bruised eyes and bleeding hands, and hope that she would reach out (she never did).

 

There were days that Tony was too hurt to play. After a day in Howard’s lab, his fragile hands were too messy with cuts and burns for the pristine ivory. When Howard broke his arm the first time, Tony couldn’t play for a month. Every day for that month, Maria would play their duets, broken and empty without his parts. She never stayed after their one song when Tony was injured like that, the pain and begging in his eyes for her to save him too much for her to bear.

 

The days Maria couldn’t play were the worst for her son. He went to the piano anyway, tapping out hours of melodies and humming her harmonies. The music would ring dissonant throughout the cavernous Mansion, calling for Maria, for _mammina_ to come, though she never did (she didn’t want her son to see her weaker than usual, beautiful face marred with bruises she couldn’t save either of them from). Those days, the Mansion smelled more of wine than whiskey (Tony hated that smell more).

 

When Tony went away to school, Maria played for hours. She played until her fingers were sore and her back ached from leaning, but she played happy songs. Her son was out, was _free_ , if only for a few months at a time. He had done it all by himself, too, something she never could do. The songs lapsed as she drank more and more from the glass on the bench in Tony’s spot.

 

By the next day, she was back to her sad harmonies for a melody that was a hundred miles away.

  


When Tony was seventeen years old, his father killed his mother (and himself, but that wasn’t as important to Tony as the fact that his _mammina_ was gone). They had played before she left, a soft song of hope. Maria, for the first time in ten years, had taken the complex melody, had _smiled_ while she played and leaned up close to Tony.

 

“I love you, _mio Antonio,_ ” she had whispered with a kiss on his head. It felt like a goodbye.

 

Hours later, Tony got the news that his father had wrapped their car around a tree on some icy back road. There were no survivors.

 

The piano couldn’t quite drown out the screaming sobs that filled the air.

 

On December sixteenth that year and the next, until it was a tradition, Tony played their last song. It sounded wrong without Maria. Without her light melodies and flying fingers, it sounded like a funeral march. Tony played it anyway. For the other three-hundred and sixty four days of the year, the piano remained dusty and shut. The rings from Maria’s wine glasses weren’t scrubbed away, the dented wood from shoves and punches not fixed. It was a metaphor for Maria’s life, beautiful and broken, so Tony left it the way it was in honor of her.

 

The piano languished in a locked room, far away from anyone and everything in a room only accessible to Tony. The security on it was only rivaled by the security in his workshop. JARVIS, the only witness to Tony’s annual breakdown, guarded it fiercely, like his counterpart had once upon a time.

  


It was December sixteenth again. Tony shut down the lab early, walking to the common area to get a snack and a drink. The Avengers were watching something, another movie night he had passed on to work on their gear (and to mourn, but they didn’t need to know that).

 

“Hey, Tony, come to join us?” Steve called from his place on the sofa.

 

Tony shook his head. “Negative, Cap,” he said. “Just grabbing some snacks to refuel. Long night ahead of me, you know how it is.” His smile was picture perfect, a casual smirk edged with tiredness and pasted on his face with a surgeon’s precision.

 

Steve frowned. “Do you want company?”

 

“I’m good, thanks,” Tony struggled to keep his voice level. He knew that everyone knew the significance of the date, knew that Tony had lost his parents to a car crash so many years ago. Everyone always assumed it was Howard he missed, though, which made it easier to brush off their meaningless condolences.

 

He didn’t wait for Steve to reply, just walked to the elevator and asked JARVIS to take him down to his piano. The floor wasn’t even on the floor plans, only accessible with JARVIS’s permission. As soon as Tony stepped foot on the floor, JARVIS blacked out, like he did every year.

 

Tony opened the door, sneezing as the dust resettled itself from where he disturbed it.

 

“ _Ciao, mamma_ ,” Tony greeted, running his finger on one of the rings from Maria’s wine glasses. He had always felt closer to his mother at her piano than her cold grave. Her stone was impersonal, filled with lies. _A beloved wife and loving mother_. “It’s been a long year. I told you, last year, about the Avengers? Well, we’re still a thing. I trust them. It’s terrifying.” He took a breath, sitting on the bench next to Maria’s ghost. His long fingers brushed the lower keys, his right foot claiming a pedal they way he used to when he was younger. In habit, he looked to his right, remembering his mother’s warm eyes when they could look back at him.

 

“I miss you, _mamma_ ,” he said to the empty air. “ _Mi manchi tanto_.”

 

Tony started on his mother’s swan song, easily remembering the patterns even if he only played them once a year. Next to him, Maria’s ghost smiled and joined in. Tony leaned to his right, like he did when he was seventeen. His hands flew, playing sad chords in memory of a happier song. The song was empty without her, hollow, but still he played. He played until the ache in his chest lessened, until his tears were flowing freely and falling onto dusty ivory. His fingers hurt, burns and scrapes from the lab twinging, but still he played.

 

The song ended as softly as it started. Tony let the final chord die out, echoing in the empty room. His eyes were firmly shut. If he didn’t open them, he could pretend that Maria was leaning down to give him her customary kiss, that the smell of alcohol was her and not him, that the warmth wasn’t all in his head.

 

“That was beautiful,” someone said. “But it’s missing something, isn’t it?”

 

Tony whirled around, mask in place despite his red rimmed eyes. “How the fuck did you get in here?” he asked Steve.

 

“JARVIS let me,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I tried to follow you after you left. I managed to convince JARVIS that it wasn’t good for you to be alone. Not today, not when you have people that care for you.”

 

“JARVIS and I will be having a talk,” Tony replied waspishly. “You shouldn’t have been able to come down here, intentions be damned. This is private for a reason, Rogers.”

 

Steve ignored Tony’s bristling, coming to stand by the piano bench. “Can I sit?” he asked.

 

Tony sucked in a breath, imagining Steve in Maria’s spot. No one had sat on that side of the bench, not since she died. Tony had always taken his customary spot on the left, whether or not she was there with him. The thought of Steve there, though, didn’t fill him with dread. “Sure,” he said finally.

 

“Were you playing a duet?” Steve asked. Tony nodded. “Where’s the other person, then?”

 

“She’s dead,” said Tony, closing his eyes again. “She died on December sixteenth, 1991.”

 

“Oh, Tony,” Steve said, voice sad. “I’m so sorry.”

 

“Shut up,” Tony said sharply. “Don’t apologize. It’s meaningless. It’s not _your_ fault. _You_ didn’t kill her. I’m sick and tired of people apologizing and faking some sort of condolence when they never even knew her! What the fuck can you be sorry for?”

 

Tony ignored the tears running down his cheeks, ignored Steve’s gentle hand wiping them away. He kept his eyes closed like a stubborn child, ignoring the world in hopes it would leave him alone.

 

“Can you teach me her part?” Steve said gently. “I used to play. Bucky’s folks had an old piano at their house. No one would buy it off them, so I used to mess around on it. I can’t promise I’m any good, though.”

 

“Not selling yourself very highly there, Steve,” Tony chucked without humor. He put his hands on the keys, reaching across Steve to touch the higher ones. “Keep up if you can.”

 

For the first time since her death, Maria’s melody filled the air. Tony had never played it before, but it didn’t matter. Decades of remembering had ingrained it into his mind as surely as practice. Steve watched his hands, trying to keep up, but Maria’s part was fast and joyful. Tony lost himself in the music and the memories. Something in him cracked open when he hit the last note and leaned to the right, touching Steve lightly instead of cold, empty air.

 

Steve didn’t move away; if anything, he moved closer to Tony, his weight different from Maria’s birdlike body but no less welcome. “I don’t think I can do that,” he admitted with a sheepish grin. “Your mother was very talented.”

 

“She was a lot of things,” said Tony, closing the lid of the piano with finality. He didn’t stand. Neither did Steve.

 

“Tell me about her?”

 

Tony breathed, feeling the broken glass in him smoothing over, just a little bit. “She wasn’t the best parent, my _mammina_ , but she was the one I had...”

 

Somewhere outside, the sun rose over an empty graveyard, shining off of the snowy stones.

 

Somewhere far, far away, a ghost smiled to the strains of a familiar song.

**Author's Note:**

> im not sure where the stony came from but were rolling with it (me??? stony??? in a post cw world??? unheard of)
> 
> thoughts?
> 
> comments and kudos are much appreciated!


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